Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire - Arcade (1995)

A few months after the release of The Kung-Fu Master Jackie Chan, Kaneko decided to tweak the game and improve on the engine in hope of greater success second time around. In Jackie Chan In Fists of Fury, all the characters are given new colors, some new moves and most importantly you can finally play as the 3 different forms of Jackie Chan.

The game runs much slower and they’ve added a new feature to the gameplay mechanic, the ground attack. When you are downed by your opponent a symbol will show up informing you to quickly tap all buttons to get up as you now can take damage while laying down. It certainly adds some excitement to the matches but in the end it feels very gimmicky and with the constant mashing of buttons, you’ll find yourself suddenly on your feet aimlessly hitting the air leaving yourself completely open to airborne attack.

The oddly colored fighters also puzzles the mind a bit. Lau is now colored in red, with blue skin and white force fields, making him a nice walking, talking Norwegian flag. Yeung has a She-Hulk thing going and is now always accompanied by 2 eagles which she send to attack. Thorsten has glowing eyes and zombie-like skin, while Sam Wong, Kim-Peree and Jackie are the only characters with human complexion. No explanation is given as to why the characters suddenly look like they do, and it doesn’t really add much to the game, except for Yeung’s eagles.

The most interesting detail that you’ll notice out of this game is that when you play as Jackie and look closely on some of the frames, you can see that he had a double to pull off some of the higher kicks and trickier movements. The reason for this is that when Jackie filmed Rumble in The Bronx, he injured his ankle quite badly, which caused problems for him filming a lot of the scenes for Thunderbolt. This game had its development time running alongside Thunderbolt, so therefore you can see Sam Wong sometimes filling in for Jackie.

When you fight another player, chances are he is gonna pick Jackie Chan immediately and you might pick hunky Thorsten to mix things up. Because Jackie is originally a boss character he is incredibly strong, and makes for some frustratingly unbalanced matches. His reach is always the best, his speed is unmatched, he deals twice the amount of damage and you can’t slice him in half if you are lucky enough to beat him. It also makes single player much easier since you can just breeze through the game as Jackie without much of a problem.

This game has more of a proper ending, which shows you some development footage and full credits. There’s no mention of any prize to be won, so Kaneko must have given up on that strategy.